K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Still searching for …

The reason I found that map of Linux tools the other day was because, oddly enough, I had entered the words “linux,” “console,” and “mind map” into Scroogle.

And as luck would have it, that popped up. A giant bonus.

As luck wouldn’t have it though, it wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for mind-mapping software for the console in Linux. Easy to see the confusion.

I was looking because Luke was looking, and neither of us seems to be able to find something that works, for example, like mind-meister.com, or like FreeMind, which was his example.

More’s the pity. Of course, it’s possible there’s one out there hiding (it may even be in that list). So if anyone knows of something that will run in the CLI, please share.

(We both agreed that something like hnb, or perhaps another “to-do” list manager might work in a pinch, but it’s not quite the same.)

And while we’re at it, I occasionally get questions about CLI-driven mp3 renamers, a laEasyTag. I would second that request.

I’ve looked into dagger and a couple of others (including a real hack job 🙄 ), but short of a graphical interface, I haven’t seen anything yet that does the same things as EasyTag can.

The only other clamor I ever hear is for a journaling application — and by that I mean something that you use to keep a daily journal, not filesystem journalling. 😉

As I have mentioned, I have seen a journal script that was e-mailed to me; I’ve asked for permission to post it here, but haven’t heard anything back.

Personally I’d like to see that concept, coupled with the ability to add daily information — like an exercise journal or a diet log. Those would be useful personally.

But they might, in reality, be little more than database programs and therefore not very thrilling. But if they’re available, there are at least two people who would be interested in finding out about them. 🙂

I think the most elegant solution to the journaling problem is to use any of the numerous blogging programs.

For example:

– Use vim to create a new journal entry. It can use markdown or textile syntax.
– Submit the journal entries to a blog compiler, e.g. chronicle or blosxom.
– Serve up the journal/blog as part of your localhost website, using your webserver of choice. Apache, Hiawatha, lighttpd, etc.
– View them in your web browser of choice. elinks, firefox, whatever.

Nice separation of concerns. Each tool does one thing and does it well. No tool tries to do it all. Very Unix-y 🙂

I use the local webserver for lots of other things too. So the overhead cost is spread out over several different projects. Just like vim and the webbrowser are. The only thing unique to my journaling solution is the blog compiler, and even that can be amortized if you also publish a blog for the world at large — like kmandla does. 🙂